


heart of a ghost

by jdphoenix



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, F/M, Vampires
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 17:30:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17248436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdphoenix/pseuds/jdphoenix
Summary: If Jemma’s heart were still beating, she imagines it would be racing right about now.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from thirty seconds to mars' "dangerous night."
> 
> This is a little different in that the first two ~chapters were originally drabbles on tumblr, never really meant to be more even though I've always had some very definite ideas about how this 'verse would pan out. But I figure it's time to collect them somewhere safer than tumblr and, since I feel silly just reposting them, I've added a more substantial chapter three to the story. As the last update to this 'verse was way back in 2017, even if you follow me over there, you might want to reread the drabbles before reading the new chapter.

It’s late—early, whatever—and Will’s entire body is craving sleep, but Jemma’s gone and he can’t rest until he knows she’s okay. So he wanders the dark halls, sending rats and insects running for cover wherever he goes, circling closer and closer to the surface until finally he finds her down a narrow little dead-end hall. His eyes water when he sees her because that’s  _sunlight_  cutting through a hole in the ceiling. It’s bright enough to blind him and so thick he imagines he could reach out and grab hold of it, and maybe Jemma thinks so too because she’s burning her fingertips on its edges.

“What are you doing?” he asks. If he’d hoped to startle her into stopping, he fails completely.

“I keep meaning to tell you about this place,” she says, still curling her fingers in and out of the light. “But there was never a good time and I just- I just wanted to see it again.”

He knows. When she first got dragged down here, the sun was the thing she missed most—next to her friends—and he hates what he had to do to keep her from clawing her way out. She’s adjusted, like all of them eventually have to, but he can see she’s still starving for real light.

“Lemme see that,” he says. She doesn’t come to him, doesn’t even turn his way. He’s gotta grab her wrist to pull it away from the sunbeam and then she’s fighting him. She claws at his face and goes for his throat, and he hates himself—hates himself  _so much—_ but he wraps his fingers around her burned hand and  _squeezes_ , and she collapses against him with a whimper that turns to sobs.

She shakes in his arms and cries into his chest and clings to him as much as she pounds at his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” he says, meaning it as much for the pain he caused her now as for what happened a few hours ago.

 _He_  wanted to see her. Will had half-convinced himself it wouldn’t happen. She was a mistake, after all. She was nothing but a meal, hollowed out and cast aside. There wasn’t supposed to be enough of her left to live—or whatever it is they’re doing here can be called. She was an accidental child, not something  _he_  should be concerned with. But after five long months,  _he_  finally took some notice and summoned her.

It didn’t go well.

“Can’t we go outside?” She tips her head back so she can look him in the eye. He tastes acid on his tongue at the sight of the tear tracks on her cheeks. “Please?”

“And burst into flame?” he asks.

“Tonight,” she insists. “We could go tonight.”

He shakes his head and tells her the same thing he has a hundred times before: “You’re too young. Even moonlight’s gonna burn you.” In a few more months she’ll be able to spend an hour or two above ground, long enough to learn to hunt.

He steps back, bringing her hand between them so he can inspect the damage. It’s bad. She’ll need to drink fresh to heal it. She won’t like that.

For the moment he can at least bandage it though and tears at his shirt.

“You don’t have to-”

“I said I’d take care of you,” he says more sharply than he means, silencing her and reminding her of the promise he made when she dragged herself out of  _his_  pile of dead.

She bites her lip and keeps quiet while he works. Mostly, anyway. He’d have been shocked if she actually made it through the whole process without a single word.

“If I only had my lab,” she says softly while giving him a finger to help with the knot near her wrist.

“You have a balm for vampire sunburns?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says pertly. “But I was thinking more about-” She darts a glance down the hall. There’s only dark and silence that way. Everyone else is fast asleep while the sun’s up – because they have  _sense_. “About my research,” she whispers, “into a cure.”

Right. The mythical cure. She talked about it after she got settled but he never really gave it much thought. People have been trying to cure vampirism for—well, for as long as  _he’s_  been alive, probably. Her efforts to cure her friend’s mom—abandoned efforts, she said, since the woman’s dead now—didn’t strike him as particularly hopeful.

“Jemma,” he says, hating himself all over again for wiping that lost-in-her-thoughts enthusiasm off her face. “You know- you’ve gotta know, after today-”

She flinches at the reminder of her audience with  _him_. Will bites down his own disgust.

“It’s not just about the blood,” he says. “He changed you, yeah, but that’s just a symptom. The real problem is that he took your soul.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t believe that.”

So he probably should’ve expected as much. She may have worked for CROSS before her death, but she’s a scientist, not a mage, and you can’t quantify a human soul.

“What you felt in that room?” he asks, hoping to make her understand. “That’s what we all feel, it’s what brings us back. You don’t have to believe it’s a soul, but you’ve gotta know he owns you, same as he owns the rest of us.”

“No,” she says resolutely, stepping closer. “It’s not that I don’t believe in the soul. I just don’t believe he has mine.”

God, is she serious right now? “Is that so?” he asks.

Her fingers curl in the remains of his shirt, and his annoyance flickers out like a candle. “Because I don’t believe I could feel what I do if I didn’t have one.”

She tugs him down into a kiss—his first kiss in nearly a century and a half. It was well worth the wait.

 


	2. Chapter 2

If Jemma’s heart were still beating, she imagines it would be racing right about now. As it is, she feels a tightness in her chest, as though her hollow lungs are compressing the inert organ between them. She struggles to stand, to move, to walk.

It’s not only her. There were screams when she fell, more voices than the echoes in these caverns can account for, like every vampire in them was suddenly struck by the same pain.

 _Will_.

He left. Hours ago it seems like, but she can’t be sure, not when she spent the day staring into the corpse of her first human kill. She leaves the body behind now, thinking only of finding Will. He could be anywhere, he could be suffering, he could be hurt. She forces her feet forward, one in front of the other, cursing her damned vampire strength as she goes because what good is it if it’s not going to help her now?

She finds others. Vampires writhing on the floor, moaning in pain. Some reach for her, some don’t seem to see her at all, but none are Will. She keeps moving.

She wonders if this is CROSS, some weapon they’ve developed in her absence. Is this her team coming to rescue her? Or are they simply taking out this nest with no idea she’s a part of it? She isn’t sure which she’d prefer.

“ _You_.” The growl brings her attention around just in time to see the blow coming.

The other vampire is on her, hands like claws and teeth barred. She reaches past his punches, grips his shoulders, uses the ground at her back for leverage to kick upward. His jaw snaps shut with such force that cold blood spurts over her face. He wails in pain. It’s an opening, enough that she can find the stake in her boot and jam it into his heart. 

Only then, while his flesh is finally giving in to years of held off decay, does she recognize him as Nathaniel, one of the nest sire’s most devoted children. She isn’t sorry to see him go.

She wipes the blood from her face and licks her hand clean, focusing on the taste and the smell to distract herself from the feel of recently cracked and broken bones snapping neatly back into place. It’s an odd sensation, one that only reminds her—more than the taste of iron and life and sweetness sliding down her throat—of the  _thing_  she’s become.

“Jemma.” The hand on her shoulder startles her, but the voice has her throwing her arms around Will.

“You’re all right,” she says into his neck. She wants to cling to him now she knows he’s safe, to drag him to the ground and welcome him inside her. (That’s another aspect of the change she isn’t wholly comfortable with yet. It’s not just blood that fills up the emptiness her death has left in her, it’s physical contact as well. Once she allowed herself to cross that boundary with Will, they both had a little trouble pulling back.) But he’s  _not_  safe. Whatever’s happened to all of them, it could only be the start of something worse. She forces her overactive libido into line and pushes away.

He immediately takes her hand. “Come on,” he orders.

They run through the halls. Nathaniel may have been one of the first to find his feet, but he isn’t the last. Here and there vampires are rising up. One lunges at them, and Will bats him aside like he’s nothing but a bug. When another makes a move for them, he’s tackled to the ground. The melee turns into a brawl, vampires crawling all over each other in a fervor.

“What’s going on?” Jemma asks while Will drags her away from the fight. She’s never seen anything like it, not in the months she’s been here, not in her two measly years of field work.

“There’s been an … incident.”

“CROSS?” she asks, half hopeful.

He gives a single shake of his head. “It’s not safe anymore. You have to go.” She wants to laugh—it’s  _never_  been safe here—but fear grips her too tightly for the sound to escape.

“What about you?” She tries to stop, to hold him back, but he’s older than her, stronger. It’s nothing for him to keep them moving.

“You’ll be safer without me.” Her heart twists and denial rises up in her throat like blood laced with silver. She can’t leave him. She  _won’t_.

But she never voices her denial because they’ve arrived. If she’d given any consideration to where they were headed, she might have thought of the heavy gates the hunters leave by every sunset, but that’s far behind them, back the way they came.

A single shaft of moonlight cuts through the dim corridor, bright as the sun to her nocturnal eyes. Only where before this dead-end was empty, now there’s an old wardrobe beneath the hole, tall enough anyone on top of it could easily reach the ceiling.

“You can dig your way out,” he says, “make it to the surface.”

“No,” she says, catching hold of his jacket. It’s torn, she realizes suddenly. She was so relieved to see him she didn’t even notice. “What-”

He takes her face between his hands. In the silence where her heartbeat used to be, she can hear the fighting behind them. Instead of fading out, it’s growing more intense, drawing closer every second.

“You’re gonna go—back to CROSS and your friends—you’ll be safe.”

She tries to argue, but then his mouth is on hers in a crushing kiss.

It’s rough and forceful at first, bringing her libido roaring back to the surface. She tastes blood on his tongue and wraps herself around him, thirsty for every drop. But oddly as Will’s attentions ease to something more tender, more loving, her lust dims to a manageable ache. She’s warm all over when he releases her, feeling somehow both drunk and more alert than ever.

“Go,” he says. She’s already in his arms thanks to her bloodlust and it’s nothing for him to pull her legs away from his waist and set her on top of the wardrobe. “ _Go_.”

She does.

.

.

.

It was only last night she had her first taste of fresh air in months, but there was no time to savor it then and for a few hours she can do nothing more than wander the streets, drinking it in. 

At first, people she passes give her a wide berth—and no wonder when she’s covered in dirt and with dried blood staining the old jacket Will gave her ages ago (or no, he didn’t. He wrapped it around her shoulders to comfort her while she quaked and cried for her lost life and then he never took it back. She doesn’t even remember putting it on over her tight jeans and low-cut top after returning to the nest)—but as the night wears on, people grow less discerning while she only grows more so. The sun will be up soon. She needs to find somewhere to spend the day. 

For a moment she thinks about going back, searching for Will in whatever’s left of the nest. But she’s been walking aimlessly for hours and has no idea where to even begin searching. That leaves her with very limited options.

It’s easy to knock into one of the drunks and take his phone. He goes twirling into the street, singing and dancing to a tune only he can hear. His friends laugh.

Jemma’s focus is already on the phone, on the trouble of deciding just whose number to dial, which of her friends to tell all that’s happened to her. She’s just narrowed it down to Coulson, May, or Daisy when she hears the squeal of tires, the twin thumps of impact—one against the car and then a second when the body hits the pavement.

The drunk’s friends are in an uproar, the driver is frozen in his seat, his heart pounding louder than bells in Jemma’s ears. She sees only the man on the asphalt. His heartbeat is softer, struggling while blood pours from a head wound.

She stares, watches the red flow like a river between the crags of the road, straight for the gutter, straight for her. It smells like iron and life and sweetness.

She isn’t hungry at all.

 


	3. Chapter 3

“There’s been a development,” Coulson says. His aura’s all foggy the way it was in the days after they lost Trip. It’s been like that way too much lately and Daisy keeps saying she’ll fix it, find some way to get him bright and shining the way he was in the old days, but today he’s especially cloudy. Whatever he’s gotta say, it must be really bad.

Daisy braces herself for whatever it is, but there’s a spark from behind him, a little flare of pink and bright and joyous, just enough to pull her attention past the lab’s windows to-

 _Jemma_.

Jemma’s alive.

Fitz is already out ahead of her but Bobbi intercepts him, tries to stop his arguing and get him to listen to … something. Daisy doesn’t really care. All she cares about his that Jemma’s _here_. She’s alive and, sure, her aura’s a little pale and faded, but so’s the rest of her. Whatever she’s been through, Daisy’s sure she’ll bounce back in no time and maybe, for the first time in more than a year, something will be okay.

Daisy sweeps right past Fitz and Bobbi, grateful for the opportunity to get in her hugs first. Only Jemma doesn’t hug her back. She sits stiff on her stool and says, “Skye…,” in a voice like cracked glass.

Maybe Daisy should let her go, give her the space she so obviously wants, but that—the reminder that Jemma’s been gone _so long_ she doesn’t even know about the name change—only has her clinging tighter.

“Daisy,” Coulson says. There’s something wrong. For one, Coulson _never_ gets her new name on the first try so this must be really serious for him to remember. For another, he sounds scared.

Jemma’s shaking when Daisy pulls back and there’s a faint clinking sound coming from her stool. Cuffs. Jemma’s been bound with iron. She couldn’t hug back if she wanted to.

“What the hell?” Daisy demands, rounding on Bobbi. Maybe she’s a little catty about it (okay, she definitely is because one of the samples sitting on the nearest lab bench starts molding over so fast it’s spreading halfway across the table before Daisy reigns her emotions in) but she can’t help it! This is just like last year with Bobbi and her people assuming that just because Daisy had one little supernatural encounter she was a threat all of a sudden. “Get these off her!”

“It’s just a precaution,” Jemma says softly. Her aura’s dimming, so much Daisy can hardly see any pink in it at all, and the look on her face is so hurt and confused that it breaks Daisy’s heart.

“Against _what_?” Daisy looks around, fixing each of them, Fitz included because she would’ve thought he’d have backed her up by now, with a heavy stare. “What _exactly_ are we afraid our miraculously-still-alive friend is gonna do?”

“Skye,” Jemma says, looking worse than ever. She squirms in her seat, which Daisy knows from experience has gotta hurt with those cuffs. “You can see…”

“See _what_?” Daisy stares hard at her, focusing on her aura, but there’s nothing. A little depression, a little weakness, but nothing a good meal—or maybe a few good meals; she looks so _thin—_ and some good company can’t cure. “You look fine to me.”

Jemma doesn’t return her smile. She looks helplessly over Daisy’s head to the others and fear grips Daisy’s heart. Maybe Jemma got kidnapped into a werewolf pack. Maybe she ate fairy food and has only this one day to say goodbye after months of servitude. Maybe she crossed a witch.

“Daisy,” Bobbi says carefully. “Jemma’s a vampire.”

“What?” Daisy laughs. “No. That’s not possible.” This is some weird joke. Not exactly a great time, given how long Jemma’s been missing, but it’s for sure a prank. There’s no way-

Jemma opens her mouth when Daisy’s wandering gaze lands on her again. Her jaw goes just a little too wide and her head tips back so Daisy can see the sharp points of fangs hidden behind her front teeth.

“Ooookay,” Daisy says slowly. Jemma doesn’t meet her eyes. She looks _ashamed_ , like those teeth are something she should be guilty over. Which is wrong on just so many levels. Daisy turns to Coulson. “I don’t know what those are, but they are not vampire fangs.”

“ _Skye_ ,” Jemma says.

Daisy doesn’t bother to look at her again. Whatever’s going on, whatever happened to her, she’s obviously been made to believe she’s a vampire. Genius that she is, it must’ve taken a lot to convince her, so Daisy’s gotta focus on Coulson first; he’s the easier target.

“I always know vampires, right?” she asks. “Always have?”

Coulson nods stiffly. Even before her dad did his voodoo on her in the spring, Daisy could see things others couldn’t. The shadows of malevolent spirits hovering over their hapless victims, flickers of the beast in lycanthropes as the full moon drew nearer, hell, she won’t even go _near_ a graveyard. But mostly she sees auras, that inner light people have shining through on the outside. The undead don’t have that. They’re empty spaces where there should be something, _anything_. They’re unholy and seeing them always gives Daisy the willies. More than once her extra sight has saved a member of the team from ending up someone’s dinner.

“Maybe you’re missing something,” Bobbi says.

Daisy rolls her eyes and doesn’t bother to explain what she knows for a 100% fact. “If you don’t believe me, give me a quinjet. I’ll find Ward and drag his stinky, werewolf ass back here and _he_ can tell you. Simmons has a _soul_. She can’t be a vampire.”

Behind her, Jemma makes a sound like she stepped on a pin.

“You _do_ ,” Daisy says, then smiles because it’s looking healthier than it has since she came in. Still thin around the edges but at its core, it’s sparkling, bright pink flashes here and gone in a blink.

And then it fades to nearly a grey.

Jemma meets her eyes. “I killed someone,” she says.

Daisy doesn’t have anything to say to that.

.

.

“It might be because I was a mistake,” Jemma says. Daisy’s- to say she’s _visiting_ wouldn’t be entirely accurate, as she’s a near constant presence on the other side of the strip of holy ground binding Jemma to Vault D. Nice as it is to have company, Jemma has long ago tired of being someone else’s sample for study.

“How are you a mistake?” Daisy asks.

Jemma doesn’t bother to look up from her drawing pad. Daisy’s tone is evidence enough of the incredulous expression she’s surely wearing. Besides, Jemma’s busy sketching a map of the caves in hopes it will aid CROSS in discovering the nest’s location. She should have been more attentive to her surroundings when she emerged from the ground, taken stock of her location so as to lead the team back later. But she didn’t even think about where she was until she was speaking to Coulson on that stolen cell phone and by then she was so turned around she had no hope of finding her way back. There was no telling how much time had even passed or how things might have progressed after she’d gone. It’s possible the nest tore itself apart without CROSS even having to lift a finger.

“Jemma?” Daisy prods gently.

“He didn’t mean to,” Jemma says as though she didn’t pause at all. “They dug me out of the rubble and brought me to him as an offering.” She’s told them all this before, of course. How one of the vampires they were unlucky enough to encounter on that last mission found her after the roof caved in and dragged her back to the nest as his nightly tribute to his sire.

She remembers it so clearly. How the cold of the stone she was laid upon ached up her shattered spine. That empty face bending over her. Fangs moving inside her, pressing deeper, drawing more of her blood free.

“He wanted to stop me crying,” she says lightly.

“Alveus?”

Her nod is very unaffected. “He covered my mouth with his hand. I don’t think he realized he’d cut it open on something.” She tried not to drink, of course. Every CROSS agent knows what happens when one drinks vampire blood. But by the time she was aware of the iron tang beneath the taste of dirt and decay coating his palm, it was likely too late.

“He could’ve known,” Daisy suggests.

Jemma shakes her head. “He threw me away.” Naturally, she wasn’t alive for that part, but as she woke up in the ever-growing pile of Alveus’ victims some time later, she can only assume he had no intention of bringing her back.

She shudders at the memory of slipping down to the ground, how those lifeless hands seemed to grasp at her. And then there were two undead hands. Strong and sure arms carrying her from the crypt.

“Did you … like it?” Daisy asks. The awkward question startles Jemma so badly she completely ruins the angle of the cave leading to the surface.

“It was a _vampire’s nest_ ,” Jemma says, not sure how else she can respond.

“Yeah, but sometimes-” Daisy huffs and shifts so she’s on the edge of her chair. “Sometimes, when you get all quiet like that thinking about it, your aura goes all-” she gestures with twiddling fingers- “happy. It’s the only time you really look like you,” she adds softly.

Guilt slices across Jemma’s heart—and, surely, across her aura as well. She thinks, for the thousandth time, of telling Daisy about that singular happiness in all her time away. But how to explain Will? Will, who saved her, who cared for her, who protected her even from herself.

“You’re doing it again,” Daisy says. She’s smiling. She’s happy to see Jemma looking more like her old, living self. But she must remember quickly enough that she’s _not_ because her face falls. “Did he- I mean, you said that he had power over you. Did you … like it?”

CROSS has long theorized that vampires are bound to their sires’ wills, and Jemma’s finally brought them proof of that. Before the night she escaped, his very presence called to her, tempted her to give in to every worse impulse she’d ever had, not just those that were unique to her new state of being. And beneath all of that was the desire to serve him. To kill so that she could feed him, to return every night to his nest that she might always be near him, to give up more of her humanity so that she could be more like him.

And then there was Will. Good and strong. He bowed to Alveus, but he didn’t break for him. If she had to be a vampire, she wanted to be like _him_ , not like their sire. She told him once that Alveus couldn’t have taken her soul, but she never told him it was because she loved him.

Or does she? More than a year ago, the team encountered a pair of vampire lovers who claimed to be very much in love. Jemma was dubious of those claims, especially considering how their so-called love manifested itself—through senseless slaughter and open abuse. Will her feelings for Will progress to that point as she loses more and more of her humanity?

It doesn’t matter, she decides while she makes an attempt at correcting the errant corridor on her crude map. Whatever she feels for Will, defining it won’t change what’s happened to him anymore than learning why Daisy can see her aura will help the team find the nest. Once they do and she learns what happened to its occupants, then she can think about all the rest.

.

.

.

Something heavy drags across the floor, dust and dirt sweeping aside beneath it. A wet gasp echoes through the room and inside Will’s head. He aches. Just … _everywhere_.

His stomach feels like a horse is inside, trying to kick its way free. His bones are tender, so many of them having snapped back into place in the last day that he’s surprised there are any left to heal. But every so often one does, the usually passing pain so intense his entire body jumps with it.

The gasp comes again, devolving into sobs this time. A meal is suffering. They deserve to be put out of their misery.

Will opens his eyes to see the body laid out before him. Hands are bound, chest is shaking, eyes try to stay on the ceiling but flicker every so often his way. The crying gets worse whenever they do.

He didn’t hunt this.

“We brought him for you.” August. He was the last to be remade before Will. He’s missing a hand now. He doesn't seem to care too much though. His head bobs slowly, nodding to the living man on the floor. “Sire.”

Grim recollection lightnings through Will. The rage that drove him to attack his sire, the lucky break that allowed him to get his fangs in the old bastard’s throat, the draw of blood that was not blood,  _Jemma_.

“Jemma?” he asks, his voice raw. His throat was crushed at some point.

“I don’t-”

“ _Where is she?_ ” he thunders. The whimpering at his feet stops. Or maybe it’s just lost under the urgent whispers that fill the darkness.

“We don’t know!” August cries. “No one’s seen her since before you…”

The horse in his gut kicks out again. He looks beyond August, sees the shadows crowded with more of them. More vampires, all with heads bowed respectfully to the one who holds their immortal souls.

Jemma’s safe. If she were dead, someone would have seen her body. She made it out.

Will looks down at the poor, suffering man. The fight took a lot out of him and the weight of all these souls is taking even more. He should put the man out of his misery.

He eats.

 


End file.
